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PA R T O N E
1
SOCIAL THINKING
This book unfolds around its definition of social psychology: the scientific study of how we think about (Part One), influence (Part Two),
and relate to (Part Three) one another.
Part One examines the scientific study of how we think about
one another (also called social cognition). Each chapter confronts
some overriding questions: How reasonable are our social attitudes,
explanations, and beliefs? Are our impressions of ourselves and others
generally accurate? How does our social thinking form? How is it
prone to bias and error, and how might we bring it closer to reality?
Chapter 2 explores the interplay between our sense of self and
our social worlds. How do our social surroundings shape our selfidentities? How does self-interest colour our social judgments and
motivate our social behaviour?
Chapter 3 looks at the amazing and sometimes rather amusing
ways we form beliefs about our social worlds. It also alerts us to some
pitfalls of social thinking and suggests how to avoid them and think
smarter.
Chapter 4 explores the links between our thinking and our
actions, between our attitudes and behaviours: Do our attitudes
determine our behaviours, or vice versa? Or does it work both ways?
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2
THE SELF IN A SOCIAL
WORLD
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
LO1
LO2
LO3
LO4
LO5
Define the self-concept.
Discuss the development of the social self.
Discuss the role of culture in the self.
Describe self-knowledge.
Define self-esteem.
Discuss self-esteem motivation.
Describe the “dark side” of self-esteem.
Discuss the self in action.
Describe self-control.
Discuss learned helplessness versus self-determination.
Define the self-serving bias.
Discuss how we evaluate the self.
Explain the self-serving bias.
Describe how the self-serving bias relates to self-esteem.
Describe self-presentation, including self-handicapping and impression
management.
A
t the centre of our worlds, more pivotal for us than anything
else, is ourselves. As we navigate our daily lives, our sense of
self continually engages the world.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
Put yourself in the shoes of students showing up for a simple experiment by Jacquie
Vorauer from the University of Manitoba and Dale Miller from Princeton University (1997).
The experimenter explains to you and one other participant that the study explores students’
experiences at the university. By a coin toss, the other participant is sent off to complete a
questionnaire while you collect your thoughts before being interviewed. Fifteen minutes later,
the experimenter gives you a peek at the other student’s glum report:
I guess I don’t really feel like I have had very many positive academic experiences. . . . I’ve found a lot of the material very difficult. . . . The worst moment
I can think of was my French final; I went completely blank at the start. . . .
I haven’t made many new friends since I got to Princeton. Mostly, I have to
rely on the people that I knew before.
Now, it’s your turn. Will you describe your personal experiences more negatively than
if you had just read (as other subjects did) a report of someone who wrote “doing well in my
courses. . . . I have had some wonderful friendships and roommates. . . . I feel more
“There are three things socially accepted than I used to”? So it happened with the actual student subjects. The
extremely hard: steel, a positivity of their self-presentations echoed those of the other student. Yet, remarkdiamond, and to know one’s ably, they did not recognize this social influence on their self-presentation. They were
self.” blind to the interplay between their social surroundings and their self-presentation.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
This is but one of many examples of the subtle connections between what
happens in the world around us and what goes on in our heads. Here are some more examples:
•
•
•
•
Social surroundings affect our self-awareness. When we are the only members of our race,
gender, or nationality in a group, we notice how we differ and how others are reacting
to our difference. The only woman in an executive meeting or math class is likely to be
acutely aware of her gender. One of the authors has noticed that he is quite aware of his
gender when volunteering at his children’s school, where almost all the teachers and
volunteers are women.
Self-interest colours our social judgment. When problems arise in a close relationship
such as marriage, we usually attribute more responsibility to our partners than to ourselves. When things go well at home or work or play, we see ourselves as more responsible. After Canadians Frederick Banting and John Macleod received a 1923 Nobel Prize
for discovering insulin, they both thought the discovery was primarily their own. Banting claimed that Macleod, who headed the laboratory, had been more a hindrance than
a help. Macleod omitted Banting’s name in speeches about the discovery (Ross, 1981).
Self-concern motivates our social behaviour. In hopes of making a positive impression, we agonize about our appearance. Like savvy politicians, we also monitor others’
behaviour and expectations and adjust our behaviour accordingly.
Social relationships help define the self. In our varied relationships, we have varying
selves (Andersen & Chen, 2002). We may be one self with Mom, another with friends,
another with teachers. How we think of ourselves is linked to the person we’re with at
the moment.
As these examples suggest, the traffic between self and society runs both ways. Our ideas and
feelings about ourselves affect how we respond to others. And others help shape our sense of self.
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
37
FIGURE 2–1
THE SELF.
Self-concept
Self-esteem
Who am I?
My sense of
self-worth
The self
Self-knowledge
How can I explain and
predict myself?
Social self
My roles as a student,
family member, and
friend; my group
identity
No topic in psychology is more researched today than the self. Our sense of self organizes
our thoughts, feelings, and actions (Figure 2–1). In the remainder of this chapter, we will take a
look at self-concept (how we come to know ourselves) and at the self in action (how our sense
of self drives our attitudes and actions).
SELF-CONCEPT: WHO AM I?
How and how accurately do we know ourselves? What determines our self-concept?
self-concept
a person’s answers to the
question, “Who am I?”
YOUR SENSE OF SELF
The most important aspect of yourself is your self. You know who you are. You experience your
own personal feelings and memories as your own. You are at the centre of your world.
To discover where this sense of self arises, neuroscientists are exploring the brain activity
that underlies your constant sense of being yourself. Some studies suggest an important role
for the right hemisphere. Put yours to sleep (with an anaesthetic to your right carotid artery)
and you likely will have trouble recognizing your own face. One patient with right hemisphere damage failed to recognize that he owned and was controlling his left hand (Decety &
Sommerville, 2003). The medial prefrontal cortex, a neuron path located in the cleft between
your brain hemispheres just behind your eyes, seemingly helps stitch together your sense
of self. It becomes more active when you think about yourself (Zimmer, 2005). The elements of your self-concept, the specific beliefs by which you define yourself, are your
self-schemas (Markus & Wurf, 1987). Schemas are mental templates by which we organize our worlds. Our self-schemas—our perceiving ourselves as athletic, overweight, smart,
or whatever—powerfully affect how we perceive, remember, and evaluate other people
and ourselves. If athletics is central to your self-concept (if being an athlete is one of your
self-schemas), then you will tend to notice others’ bodies and skills. You will quickly recall
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 37
self-schema
beliefs about self that
organize and guide
the processing of selfrelevant information
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
sports-related experiences. And you will welcome information that is consistent with your
self-schema (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). The self-schemas that make up our self-concepts
help us organize and retrieve our experiences.
POSSIBLE SELVES
possible selves
images of what we dream
of or dread becoming in
the future
Our self-concepts include not only our self-schemas about who we currently are but also
who we might become—our possible selves. Hazel Markus and her colleagues (Inglehart
et al., 1989; Markus & Nurius, 1986) noted that our possible selves include our visions of the
self we dream of becoming—the rich self, the thin self, the passionately loved and loving
self. They also include the self we fear becoming—the underemployed self, the unloved
self, the academically failed self. Such possible selves motivate us with a vision of the life
we long for, and the life we hope to avoid.
Development of the social self
The self-concept has become a major social-psychological focus because it helps organize our
thinking and guide our social behaviour. But what determines our self-concept? Studies of
twins point to genetic influences on personality and self-concept, but social experience also
plays a part. Among these influences are the following:
•
•
•
•
•
our social identity
the comparisons we make with others
our successes and failures
how other people judge us
the surrounding culture
SOCIAL IDENTITY
social identity
the “we” aspect of
our self-concept. The
part of our answer
to “Who am I?” that
comes from our group
memberships. Examples:
“I am Australian.” “I am
Catholic.”
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 38
Our self-concept—our sense of who we are—contains not just our personal identity (our
sense of our personal attributes) but our social identity. The social definition of who you
are—your race, religion, sex, academic major, and so forth—implies, too, a definition of who
you are not.
When we’re part of a small group surrounded by a larger group, we are often conscious
of our social identity; when our social group is the majority, we think less about it. As a solo
female in a group of men, or as a solo Canadian in a group of Europeans, we are conscious
of our uniqueness. To be a Black student on a mostly White campus, or a White student on
a mostly Black campus, is to feel one’s ethnic identity keenly and to react accordingly. In Canada,
most people identify themselves as “Canadian”—except in Quebec, where francophones are
more likely to identify themselves as “Québécois” (Kalin & Berry, 1995).
In Britain, where the English outnumber the Scots 10 to 1, Scottish identity defines itself
partly by differences with the English. “To be Scottish is, to some degree, to dislike or resent
the English” (Meech & Kilborn, 1992). The English, as the majority, are less conscious of being
not-Scottish. In the guest book of a Scottish hotel where one of the authors stayed recently,
all the English guests reported “British” nationality, but all the Scots (who are equally British)
reported their nationality as “Scottish.”
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
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Social comparisons
Our self of self is also shaped by how we compare ourselves to others. Take, for example,
a study conducted by Penelope Lockwood from the University of Toronto and Ziva
Kunda from the University of Waterloo (Lockwood & Kunda, 1997). They exposed firstyear or fourth-year accounting students to an article about a star accounting student who
had won numerous awards, attained a very high grade average, and landed a spectacular
job. For first-year students, this role model represented an achievement they could hope
to attain. If all went well, they too could have such a fantastic future. For fourth-year
students, however, this role model did not present such hope. They knew all too well that at
this point in their studies they would never measure up to such a superstar student. As you
can see in Figure 2–2, such comparisons had strong effects on these students’ self-evaluations.
When first- and fourth-year students did not compare to the superstar, they had similar selfevaluations. But when they were exposed to the superstar, first-year students seemed
inspired; their self-evaluations rose dramatically. Fourth-year students, on the other hand,
seemed dejected; their self-evaluations dropped steeply. This research demonstrates the
fundamental principle that our comparisons to others are a strong determinant of our
self-view.
These social comparisons shape our identities as rich or poor, smart or dumb, tall or
short: We compare ourselves with those around us and become conscious of how we differ. We
then use others as a benchmark by which we can evaluate our performance and our beliefs.
Social comparisons can profoundly affect our self-feelings. People who are concerned about
their weight feel worse about themselves just after reading about a thin peer (Trottier, Polivy, &
Herman, 2007).
Social comparison explains why students tend to have a higher academic self-evaluation
if they attend a school with mostly average students (Marsh et al., 2000), and how that selfevaluation can be threatened after graduation when a student who excelled in an average
high school goes on to an academically selective university. The “big fish” is no longer in a
small pond.
social comparison
evaluating your
abilities and opinions
by comparing yourself
to others
FIGURE 2–2
9
No comparison
Self-evaluation
Superstar
comparison
8
7
First
SOCIAL
COMPARISON AND
SELF-EVALUATION.
People are inspired
by a role model if
they can attain similar
success, but they are
demoralized if they
cannot. (Data from
Lockwood & Kunda,
1997)
Fourth
Participants' year in school
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
40
Much of life revolves around social comparisons. We feel handsome when others seem
homely, smart when others seem dull, caring when others seem callous. When we witness a
peer’s performance, we cannot resist implicitly comparing ourselves (Gilbert et al., 1995; Stapel
& Suls, 2004). We may, therefore, privately take some pleasure in a peer’s failure, especially
when it happens to someone we envy and when we don’t feel vulnerable to such misfortune
ourselves (Lockwood, 2002; Smith et al., 1996).
Social comparisons can also diminish our satisfaction. When we experience an increase
in affluence, status, or achievement, we “compare upward”—we raise the standards by which
we evaluate our attainments. When climbing the ladder of success, we tend to look
“Make no comparisons!”
up, not down; we compare ourselves with others doing even better (Gruder, 1977;
—KING CHARLES I, 1600–49
Suls & Tesch, 1978; Wheeler & others, 1982). When facing competition, we often
protect our shaky self-concept by perceiving the competitor as advantaged. For
example, college swimmers believed that their competitors had better coaching and more practice time (Shepperd & Taylor, 1999).
Success and failure
Self-concept is also fed by our daily experiences. To undertake challenging yet realistic tasks
and to succeed is to feel more competent. After mastering the physical skills needed to repel a
sexual assault, women feel less vulnerable, less anxious, and more in control (Ozer & Bandura,
1990). After experiencing academic success, students believe they are better at school, which
often stimulates them to work harder and achieve more (Felson, 1984; Marsh & Young, 1997).
To do one’s best and achieve is to feel more confident and empowered.
This success-feeds-self-esteem principle has led several research psychologists to question
efforts to boost achievement by raising self-esteem with positive messages (“You are somebody!
You’re special!”). Self-esteem comes not only from telling children how wonderful they are, but
also—and perhaps more importantly—from hard-earned achievements. Feelings follow reality.
When they don’t, it can cause problems. Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo and her
colleagues recently found that repeating positive self-statements, like “I am a lovable person,”
can actually backfire. Doing so made people with high self-esteem feel a bit better about themselves, but made people with low self-esteem—those who needed a boost the most—feel worse
(Wood, Perunovic, & Lee, 2009).
To be sure, low self-esteem does cause problems. Compared with those with low selfesteem, people with a sense of self-worth are happier, less neurotic, less troubled by insomnia,
less prone to drug and alcohol addictions, more persistent after failure, and healthier, at least in
part because they have stronger social bonds (Brockner & Hulton, 1978; Brown, 1991; Tafarodi
& Vu, 1997; Stinson et al., 2008). But as we will see, critics argue that it’s at least as true the other
way around: Problems and failures can cause low self-esteem.
Other people’s judgments
When people think well of us, it helps us think well of ourselves. Children whom others label
as gifted, hardworking, or helpful tend to incorporate such ideas into their self-concepts and
behaviour (see Chapter 3). If minority students feel threatened by negative stereotypes of their
academic ability, or if women feel threatened by low expectations for their math and science
performance, they may “disidentify” with those realms. Rather than fight such prejudgments,
they may identify their interests elsewhere (Steele, 1997; and see Chapter 9).
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
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The looking-glass self was how sociologist Charles H. Cooley (1902) described our use
of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves. Fellow sociologist
George Herbert Mead (1934) refined this concept, noting that what matters for our selfconcept is not how others actually see us but the way we imagine they see us. People generally feel freer to praise than to criticize; they voice their compliments and restrain their
gibes. We may, therefore, overestimate others’ appraisal, inflating our self-image (Shrauger
& Schoeneman, 1979).
Self-inflation, as we will see, is found most strikingly in Western countries. Kitayama
(1996) reported that Japanese visitors to North America were routinely struck by the many
words of praise that friends offer one another. When he and his colleagues asked people how
many days ago they last complimented someone, the most common American response was
one day. In Japan, where people are socialized less to feel pride in personal achievement and
more to feel shame in failing others, the most common response was four days.
Our ancestors’ fate depended on what others thought of them. Their survival was enhanced
when protected by their group. When perceiving their group’s disapproval, there was biological
wisdom to their feeling shame and low self-esteem. As their heirs, having a similar deep-seated
need to belong, we feel the pain of low self-esteem when we face social exclusion, noted Mark
Leary (1998, 2004b). Self-esteem, he argued, is a psychological gauge by which we monitor and
react to how others appraise us.
Our self-esteem tracks how we see ourselves on traits that we believe are valued by others.
People believe that social acceptance often depends on easily observable traits, like physical
appearance and social skills. Though people say they value communal traits—traits that denote
a concern and connection to other people, like kindness and understanding—they recognize
that appearance is often what attracts others. And self-esteem corresponds more closely to such
superficial traits than to communal qualities (Anthony, Holmes, & Wood, 2007).
Self-esteem is, however, predicted by communal qualities for people whose roles make
these qualities attractive to others. Our society values kindness and caring in women (more so
than in men) and in people in romantic relationships. For these individuals, self-esteem tracks
communal qualities. Self-esteem thus depends on whether or not we believe we have traits that
make us attractive to others, and not necessarily on the traits that we say we value most.
SELF AND CULTURE
How would you complete this statement: “I am _____”? Would you give information about
your personal traits, such as “I am honest,” “I am tall,” or “I am outgoing”? Or would you also
describe your social identity, such as “I am a Pisces,” “I am a MacDonald,” or “I am a Muslim”?
For some people, especially those in industrialized Western cultures, individualism prevails. Identity is self-contained. Adolescence is a time of separating from parents, becoming
self-reliant, and defining one’s personal, independent self. One’s identity—as a unique individual
with particular abilities, traits, values, and dreams—remains fairly constant.
The psychology of Western cultures assumes that your life will be enriched by believing in
your power of personal control. Western literature, from The Iliad to Anne of Green Gables, celebrates the self-reliant individual more than the person who fulfills others’ expectations. Movie
plots feature rugged heroes who buck the establishment. Songs proclaim “I Did It My Way,” and
“I Gotta Be Me,” and revere “The Greatest Love of All”—loving oneself (Schoeneman, 1994).
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 41
individualism
the concept of giving
priority to one’s own
goals over group goals
and defining one’s
identity in terms of
personal attributes
rather than group
identifications
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collectivism
giving priority to the
goals of one’s groups
(often one’s extended
family or work group)
and defining one’s
identity accordingly
interdependent self
construing one’s identity
in relation to others
PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
Individualism flourishes when people experience affluence, mobility, urbanism, and mass
media (Freeman, 1997; Marshall, 1997; Triandis, 1994).
Most cultures native to Asia, Africa, and Central and South America place a greater value
on collectivism. They nurture what Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Markus (1995) call the
interdependent self. In these cultures, people are more self-critical and have less need for
positive self-regard (Heine et al., 1999). Malaysians, Indians, Japanese, and traditional Kenyans
such as the Maasai, for example, are much more likely than Australians, Canadians, Americans,
and the British to complete the “I am” statement with their group identities (Kanagawa et al.,
2001; Ma & Schoeneman, 1997). When speaking, people using the languages of collectivist
countries say “I” less often (Kashima & Kashima, 1998, 2003). A person might say, “Went to the
movie,” rather than “I went to the movie.”
Pigeonholing cultures as solely individualist or collectivist oversimplifies: Within any culture, individualism varies from person to person (Oyserman et al., 2002a, 2002b). There are
individualist Chinese and collectivist Americans, and most of us sometimes behave communally, sometimes individualistically (Bandura, 2004). Individualism–collectivism also varies
across a country’s regions and political views. Conservatives tend to be economic individualists
(“don’t tax or regulate me”) and moral collectivists (“legislate against immorality”). Liberals
tend to be economic collectivists (supporting universal health care) and moral individualists
(“let people choose for themselves”). Despite individual and subcultural variations, however,
researchers continue to regard individualism and collectivism as genuine cultural variables
(Schimmack et al, 2005).
Culture and cognition
The Self in a Social World
© The New Yorker Collection 2000, Jack
Ziegler, from cartoonbank.com. All Rights
Reserved.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 42
In his book The Geography of Thought (2003), social psychologist Richard Nisbett
contends that collectivism also results in different ways of thinking. Consider: Which
two, of a panda, a monkey, and a banana, go together? Perhaps a monkey and a panda,
because they both fit the category “animal”? Asians more often than Americans see relationships: monkey eats banana. When shown an animated underwater scene (Figure 2–3),
Japan ese respondents spontaneously recalled
60 percent more background features than did
Americans; and they spoke of more relationships (the frog beside the plant). Americans
look more at the focal object, such as a single
big fish, and less at the surroundings (Chua et
al., 2005; Nisbett, 2003), a result duplicated in
studies examining activation in different areas of
the brain (Goh et al., 2007; Lewis et al., 2008).
When shown drawings of groups of children,
Japanese students took the facial expressions
of all of the children into account when rating
the happiness or anger of an individual child,
whereas Americans focused on only the child
they were asked to rate (Masuda et al., 2008).
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
43
FIGURE 2–3
ASIAN AND
WESTERN
THINKING.
When shown an
underwater scene
such as this one, Asians
often describe the
environment and the
relationships among
the fish. Americans
attend more to a single
big fish (Nisbett, 2003).
Nisbett and Takahido Masuda (2003) concluded from such studies that East Asians think
more holistically—perceiving and thinking about objects and people in relationship to one
another and to their environment.
If you grew up in a Western culture, you were probably told to “express yourself ”—through
writing, the choices you make, and the products you buy, and perhaps through your tattoos or
piercings. When asked about the purpose of language, American students were more likely to
explain that it allows self-expression, whereas Korean students focused on how language allows
communication with others. American students were also more likely to see their choices as
expressions of themselves and to evaluate their choices more favourably (Kim & Sherman,
2007). The individualized latté—“decaf, single shot, skinny, extra hot”—that seems just right
at a North American espresso shop would seem strange in Seoul, noted Heejun Kim and Hazel
Markus (1999). In Korea, people place less value on expressing their uniqueness and more on
tradition and shared practices (Choi & Choi, 2002; and Figure 2–4). Korean advertisements
tend to feature people together; they seldom highlight personal choice or freedom (Markus,
2001; Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008).
With an interdependent self, people have a greater sense of belonging. If they were
uprooted and cut off from family, colleagues, and loyal friends, interdependent people
would lose the social connections that define who they are. They have not one self but many
selves: self-with-parents, self-at-work, self-with-friends (Cross et al., 1992). As Figure 2–5
and Table 2–1 suggest, the interdependent
self is embedded in social memberships.
Conversation is less direct and more polite
(Holtgraves, 1997), and people focus
more on gaining social approval (Lalwani
& others, 2006). The goal of social life
is to harmonize with and support one’s
communities, not—as it is in more individualistic societies—to enhance one’s
individual self.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 43
FIGURE 2–4
WHICH PEN
WOULD YOU
CHOOSE?
When Heejun Kim and
Hazel Markus (1999)
invited people to
choose one of these
pens, 77 percent of
Americans but only
31 percent of Asians
chose the uncommon
colour (regardless
of whether it was
orange, as here, or
green). This result
illustrates differing
cultural preferences
for uniqueness and
conformity, noted Kim
and Markus.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
FIGURE 2–5
SELF-CONSTRUAL AS
INDEPENDENT OR
INTERDEPENDENT.
Mother
Father
Father
Mother
The independent
self acknowledges
relationships
with others; the
interdependent self is
more deeply embedded
in others (Markus &
Kitayama, 1991).
Sibling
Self
Self
Sibling
Friend
Friend
Co-worker
Friend
Friend
Co-worker
Independent view of self
Interdependent view of self
Even within one culture, personal history can influence self-views. People who have
moved from place to place are happier when people understand their constant, personal
selves; people who have always lived in the same town are more pleased when someone
recognizes their collective identity (Oishi et al., 2007). Our self-concepts seem to adjust to
our situation: If you interact with the same people all your life, they are more important to
your identity than if you are uprooted every few years and must make new friends. Your self
becomes your constant companion (echoing the nonsensical but correct statement “Wherever
you go, there you are”).
Culture and self-esteem
Self-esteem in collectivist cultures correlates closely with “what others think of me and my
group.” Self-concept is malleable (context-specific) rather than stable (enduring across situations). In one study, four in five Canadian students but only one in three Chinese and Japanese
students agreed that “the beliefs that you hold about who you are (your inner self) remain the
same across different activity domains” (Tafarodi et al., 2004).
For those in individualistic cultures, self-esteem is more personal and less relational.
Threaten our personal identity and we’ll feel angrier and gloomier than when someone threatens our collective identity (Gaertner et al., 1999). Japanese subjects persist more on tasks when
TABLE 2–1SELF-CONCEPT: INDEPENDENT OR INTERDEPENDENT.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 44
Independent
Interdependent
Identity is
Personal, defined by individual
traits and goals
Social, defined by connections
with others
What matters
Me—personal achievement
and fulfillment; my rights
and liberties
We—group goals and solidarity;
our social responsibilities and
relationships
Disapproves of
Conformity
Egotism
Illustrative motto
“To thine own self be true”
“No one is an island”
Cultures that support
Individualistic Western
Collectivistic Asian and
developing world
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
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they are failing (wanting not to fall short of others’ expectations), while people in individualistic countries persist more when succeeding, because for them, success elevates self-esteem
(Heine et al., 2001). Western individualists like to make comparisons with others that boost
their self-esteem. Asian collectivists make comparisons (often upward, with those doing better)
in ways that facilitate self-improvement (White & Lehman, 2005).
So when, do you suppose, are university students in collectivist Japan and individualist
United States most likely to report positive emotions such as happiness and elation? For Japanese students, happiness comes with positive social engagement—with feeling close, friendly,
and respectful. For American students, it more often comes with disengaged emotions—with
feeling effective, superior, and proud (Kitayama & Markus, 2000). Conflict in collectivist cultures often takes place between groups; individualist cultures breed more crime and divorce
between individuals (Triandis, 2000).
When Kitayama (1999), after ten years of teaching and researching in America, visited his
Japanese alma mater, Kyoto University, graduate students were “astounded” when he explained
the Western idea of the independent self. “I persisted in explaining this Western notion of selfconcept—one that my American students understood intuitively—and finally began to persuade them that, indeed, many Americans do have such a disconnected notion of self. Still, one
of them, sighing deeply, said at the end, ‘Could this really be true?’”
When East continues to meet West—as happens, for example, thanks to Western influences in urban Japan and to Japanese exchange students visiting Western countries—does
the self-concept become more individualized? Are the Japanese influenced when exposed to
Western promotions based on individual achievement, with admonitions to “believe in one’s
own possibilities,” and with movies in which the heroic individual police officer catches the
crook despite others’ interference? They seem to be, report Steven Heine and his co-researchers
(1999). Personal self-esteem increased among Japanese exchange students after spending seven
Collectivism in action:
Following the 2004 tsunami,
people acted together to
help one another.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 45
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
46
months at the University of British Columbia. Individual self-esteem is also higher among
long-term Asian immigrants to Canada than among more recent immigrants (and than it is
among those living in Asia).
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Why did you choose your university? Why did you lash out at your roommate? Why did you
fall in love with that special person? Sometimes we know. Sometimes we don’t. Asked why we
have felt or acted as we have, we produce plausible answers. Yet, when causes are subtle, our
self-explanations are often wrong. We may dismiss factors that matter and inflate others that
don’t. People may misattribute their rainy-day gloom to life’s emptiness (Schwarz & Clore,
1983). And people routinely deny being influenced by the media, which, they readily acknowledge, affects others.
Also thought-provoking are studies in which people recorded their moods every day for
two or three months (Stone et al., 1985; Weiss & Brown, 1976; Wilson et al., 1982). They also
recorded factors that might affect their moods: the day of the week, the weather, the
“You don’t know your own
amount they slept, and so forth. At the end of each study, the people judged how
mind.”
much each factor had affected their moods. Remarkably (given that their attention
JONATHAN SWIFT, POLITE
was being drawn to their daily moods), there was little relationship between their
CONVERSATION, 1738
perceptions of how well a factor predicted their mood and how well it actually did
so. These findings raise a disconcerting question: How much insight do we really have into
what makes us happy or unhappy? As Dan Gilbert notes in Stumbling on Happiness (2007), not
much: We are remarkably bad predictors of what will make us happy.
Predicting behaviour
planning fallacy
the tendency to
underestimate how long it
will take to complete a task
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 46
People also err when predicting their behaviour.
Dating couples tend to predict the longevity of their relationships through rose-coloured
glasses. Their friends and family often know better, reported Tara MacDonald and Michael Ross
(1997). Among University of Waterloo students, their roommates were better predictors of
whether their romances would survive than they were. Medical residents weren’t very good at
predicting whether they would do well on a surgical skills exam, but their peers in the program
predicted each other’s performance with startling accuracy (Lutsky et al., 1993). So if you’re in
love and want to know whether it will last, don’t listen to your heart—ask your roommate. And
if you want to predict your routine daily behaviours—how much time you will spend laughing,
on the phone, or watching TV, for example—your close friends’ estimates will likely prove at
least as accurate as your own (Vazire & Meehl, 2008).
One of the most common errors in behaviour prediction is underestimating how long it
will take to complete a task (called the planning fallacy). The Sydney Opera House was supposed to be completed in six years; it took sixteen years. In 1969, Mayor Jean Drapeau proudly
announced that a stadium with a retractable roof would be built for the 1976 Olympics; the
roof was completed in 1989. In one study, Wilfrid Laurier University students writing
an honours thesis were asked to predict when they would complete the project. On average,
students finished three weeks later than their “most realistic” estimate—and a week later than
their “worst-case scenario” (Buehler et al., 2002)! However, friends and teachers were able to
predict just how late these papers would be. Just as you should ask your friends how long your
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
47
STORY behind the RESEARCH
We began our collaboration by wondering out loud.
Shinobu wondered why American life was so weird.
Hazel countered with anecdotes about the strangeness of Japan. Cultural psychology is about making
the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Our
shared cultural encounters astonished us and convinced us that when it comes to psychological functioning, place matters.
After weeks of lecturing in Japan to students with
a good command of English, Hazel wondered why the
students did not say anything—no questions, no comments. She assured students she was interested in
ideas that were different from hers, so why was there
no response? Where were the arguments, debates,
and signs of critical thinking? Even if she asked a
straightforward question—for example, “Where is the
best noodle shop?”—the answer was invariably an
audible intake of air followed by “It depends.” Didn’t
Japanese students have preferences, ideas, opinions,
and attitudes? What is inside a head if it isn’t these
things? How could you know someone if she didn’t
tell you what she was thinking?
On the other hand, Shinobu was curious about
why students shouldn’t just listen to a lecture and
why American students felt the need to be constantly
interrupting each other and talking over each other
and the professor. Why did the comments and questions reveal strong emotions and have a competitive
edge? What was the point of this arguing? Why did
intelligence seem to be associated with getting the
best of another person, even within a class where
people knew each other well?
Shinobu expressed his amazement at American
hosts who bombard their guests with choices. Do you
want wine or beer, or soft drinks or juice, or coffee
or tea? Why burden the guest with trivial decisions?
Surely the host knew what would be good refreshment on this occasion and could simply provide
something appropriate.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 47
Choice as a burden? Hazel wondered if this could
be the key to one particularly humiliating experience
in Japan. A group of eight was in a French restaurant,
and everyone was following the universal restaurant
script and was studying the menu. The waiter
approached and stood nearby. Hazel announced her
choice of appetizer and entrée. Next was a tense conversation among the Japanese host and the Japanese
guests. When the meal was served, it was not what
she had ordered. Everyone at the table was served
the same meal. This was deeply disturbing. If you
can’t choose your own dinner, how could it be enjoyable? What was the point of the menu if everybody is
served the same meal? Could a sense of sameness be
a good or a desirable feeling in Japan?
When Hazel walked around the grounds of a temple in Kyoto, there was a fork in the path and a sign
that read, “ordinary path.” Who would want to take the
ordinary path? Where was the special, less travelled
path? Choosing the non-ordinary path may be an
obvious course for Americans, but in this case it led
to the temple dump outside the temple grounds. The
ordinary path did not denote the dull and unchallenging way; it meant the good and appropriate way.
These exchanges inspired our experimental studies and reminded us that there are ways of life beyond
the ones that each of us knows best. So far, most of
psychology has been produced by psychologists
in middle-class White American settings studying
middle-class White American respondents. In other
sociocultural contexts, there can be different ideas
and practices about how to be a person and how to
live a meaningful life, and these differences have an
influence on psychological functioning. It is this realization that fuels our continuing interest in collaboration and in cultural psychology.
Hazel Rose Markus
Stanford University
Shinobu Kitayama
University of Michigan
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
relationship is likely to survive, if you want to know when you will finish your term paper, ask
your roommate or your mom. You could also do what Microsoft does: Managers automatically
add 30 percent onto a software developer’s estimate of completion—and 50 percent if the project involves a new operating system (Dunning, 2006).
Or you can try predicting someone else’s actions. A month before an election, Nicholas
Epley and David Dunning (2006) asked students to predict whether they would vote. Almost all
(90 percent) predicted they would vote; but only 69 percent actually did—a virtually identical
percentage to the 70 percent who predicted that a peer would vote. So if students had only
considered what their peers were likely to do, they would have predicted their own behaviour
very accurately. Sixth century bc philosopher Lao-tzu said that “He who knows others is
learned. He who knows himself is enlightened.” If he was right, most people, it would seem, are
more learned than enlightened.
Predicting feelings
Many of life’s big decisions involve predicting our future feelings. Would marrying this person
lead to lifelong contentment? Would entering this profession make for satisfying
“When a feeling was there,
work? Would going on this vacation produce a happy experience? Or would the
they felt as if it would never
likelier results be divorce, job burnout, and holiday disappointment?
go; when it was gone, they
Sometimes we know how we will feel—if we fail that exam, win that big game,
felt as if it had never been;
or
take
that half-hour jog. We know what exhilarates us, and what makes us anxious
when it returned, they felt
or bored. Other times we may mispredict our responses. Asked how they would
as if it had never gone.”
feel if asked sexually harassing questions on a job interview, most women studied
GEORGE MACDONALD, WHAT’S
MINE’S MINE, 1886
by Julie Woodzicka and Marianne LaFrance (2001) said they would feel angry.
When actually asked such questions, however, women more often experienced fear.
Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal that people have greatest difficulty predicting the
intensity and the duration of their future emotions (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). People have mispredicted how they would feel some time after a romantic breakup, receiving a gift, losing an
election, winning a game, and being insulted (Gilbert & Ebert, 2002; Loewenstein & Schkade
1999). Some examples follow:
•
•
•
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 48
Hungry shoppers do more impulse buying (“Those doughnuts would be delicious!”)
than when shopping after eating a mega-sized blueberry muffin (Gilbert & Wilson,
2000). When hungry, we mispredict how gross those deep-fried doughnuts will seem
when sated. When stuffed, we underestimate how yummy a doughnut might be with
a late-night glass of milk.
Undergraduates who experienced a romantic breakup were less upset afterward than
they predicted they would be (Eastwick et al., 2007). Their distress lasted just about
as long as they thought it would, but the heartbroken students were not as hard-hit
as they imagined they would be. European track athletes similarly overestimated how
bad they would feel if they failed to reach their goal in an upcoming meet (van Dijk et
al., 2008).
When natural disasters like hurricanes occur, people predict that their sadness will be
greater if more people are killed. But after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, students’
sadness was similar when they believed 50 people had been killed or 1000 had been
killed (Dunn & Ashton-James, 2008). What did influence how sad people felt? Seeing
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
•
•
pictures of victims. Poignant images on TV have a great deal of influence on us after
disasters.
People overestimate how much their well-being would be affected by warmer winters,
losing weight, more television channels, or more free time. Even extreme events, such
as winning a provincial lottery or suffering a paralyzing accident, affect long-term
happiness less than most people suppose.
When male youths are shown sexually arousing photographs, then exposed to
a passionate date scenario in which their date asks them to “stop,” they admit that
they might not stop. If not shown sexually arousing pictures first, they more often
deny the possibility of being sexually aggressive. When not aroused, one easily mispredicts how one will feel and act when aroused—a phenomenon that leads
to professions of love during lust, to unintended pregnancies, and to repeat
offences among sex abusers who have sincerely vowed “never again.”
Our intuitive theory would be this: We want. We get. We are happy. If that were true, this
chapter would have fewer words. In reality, noted Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson (2000), we
often “miswant.” People who imagine an idyllic desert island holiday with sun, surf, and sand
may be disappointed when they discover “how much they require daily structure, intellectual
stimulation, or regular infusions of Pop Tarts.” We think that if our candidate or team wins we
will be delighted for a long while. But study after study reveals our vulnerability to impact bias—
overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events. Faster than we expect, the
emotional traces of such good tidings evaporate.
Moreover, we are especially prone to impact bias after negative events. When Gilbert and his colleagues (1998) asked assistant professors to predict their happiness a
few years after achieving tenure or not, most believed that achieving tenure was important for their future happiness. “Losing my job would crush my life’s ambitions. It would
be terrible.” Yet when surveyed several years after the event, those denied tenure were
about as happy as those who received it. Impact bias is important, said Wilson and Gilbert (2005), because people’s “affective forecasts”—their predictions of their future
emotions—influence their decisions. If people overestimate the intensity and duration of the
pleasure they will gain from purchasing a new car or undergoing cosmetic surgery, then they may make ill-advised
investments in that new Mercedes or extreme makeover.
Let’s make this personal. Gilbert and Wilson invite us
to imagine how we might feel a year after losing our nondominant hands. Compared with today, how happy would
you be?
Thinking about this, you perhaps focused on what
the calamity would mean: no clapping, no shoe tying, no
competitive basketball, no speedy keyboarding. Although
you likely would forever regret the loss, your general happiness some time after the event would be influenced by
“two things: (a) the event, and (b) everything else” (Gilbert
& Wilson, 2000). In focusing on the negative event, we discount the importance of everything else that contributes to
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 49
49
impact bias
overestimating the
enduring impact of
emotion-causing events
Predicting behaviour, even
one’s own, is no easy
matter, which may be why
this visitor goes to a tarot
card reader in hope of help.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
immune neglect
happiness and so overpredicted our enduring misery. “Nothing that you focus on will make
as much difference as you think,” concurred researchers David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman (1998). Moreover, said Wilson and Gilbert (2003), people neglect the speed and power of
their psychological immune system, which includes their strategies for rationalizing, discounting, forgiving, and limiting emotional trauma. Being largely ignorant of our psychological
immune system (a phenomenon Gilbert and Wilson called immune neglect), we adapt to
disabilities, romantic breakups, exam failures, tenure denials, and personal and team defeats
more readily than we would expect. Ironically, Gilbert and his colleagues reported (2004),
major negative events (which activate our psychological defences) can be less enduringly
distressing than minor irritations (which don’t activate our defences). In other words, under
most circumstances, we are remarkably resilient.
the human tendency to
underestimate the speed
and the strength of the
“psychological immune
system,” which enables
emotional recovery
and resilience after bad
things happen
dual attitudes
differing implicit
(automatic) and explicit
(consciously controlled)
attitudes toward the
same object. Verbalized
explicit attitudes may
change with education
and persuasion; implicit
attitudes change slowly,
with practice that forms
new habits
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 50
The wisdom and illusions of self-analysis
To a striking extent, then, our intuitions are often dead wrong about what has influenced us and
what we will feel and do. But let’s not overstate the case. When the causes of our behaviour are
conspicuous and the correct explanation fits our intuition, our self-perceptions will be accurate
(Gavanski & Hoffman, 1987). When the causes of behaviour are obvious to an observer, they
are usually obvious to us as well.
As Chapter 3 will explore further, we are unaware of much that goes on in our minds.
Studies of perception and memory show that we are more aware of the results of our thinking
than its process. We experience the results of our mind’s unconscious workings when we set
a mental clock to record the passage of time and to awaken us at an appointed hour, or when
we somehow achieve a spontaneous creative insight after a problem has unconsciously “incubated.” Creative scientists and artists, for example, often cannot report the thought processes
that produced their insights.
Timothy Wilson (1985, 2002) offers a bold idea: The mental processes that control our
social behaviour are distinct from the mental processes through which we explain our behaviour. Our rational explanations may, therefore, omit the unconscious attitudes that actually
guide our behaviour. In nine experiments, Wilson and his colleagues (1989, 2008) found that
the attitudes people consciously expressed toward things or people usually predicted their subsequent behaviour reasonably well. Their attitude reports became useless, however, if the participants were first asked to analyze their feelings. For example, dating couples’ current happiness
with their relationship accurately predicted whether they would still be dating several months
later. But participants who first listed all the reasons they could think of why their relationship
was good or bad before rating their happiness were misled—their happiness ratings were useless
in predicting the future of the relationship! Apparently the process of dissecting the relationship drew attention to easily verbalized factors that actually were less important than aspects
of the relationship that were harder to verbalize. We are often “strangers to ourselves,” Wilson
concluded (2002).
In a later study, Wilson and his co-workers (1993) had people choose one of two posters
to take home. Those asked first to identify reasons for their choice preferred a humorous poster
(whose positive features they could more easily verbalize). But a few weeks later, they were less
satisfied with their choice than were those who just went by their gut feelings and generally chose
the other, more artistic poster. Such findings illustrate that we have a dual attitude system, said
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Wilson and his colleagues (2000). Our automatic implicit attitudes regarding some“Self-contemplation is a
one or something often differ from our consciously controlled, explicit attitudes
curse that makes an old
(Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Nosek, 2007). From childhood, for example, we
confusion worse.”
may retain a habitual, automatic fear or dislike of people for whom we now verbalTHEODORE ROETHKE, THE
COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE
ize respect and appreciation. Although explicit attitudes may change with relative
ROETHKE, 1975
ease, noted Wilson, “implicit attitudes, like old habits, change more slowly.” With
repeated practice, acting on the new attitude, new habitual attitudes can, however,
replace old ones.
Murray Millar and Abraham Tesser (1992) believed that Wilson overstated our ignorance
of self. Their research suggests that, yes, drawing people’s attention to reasons diminishes the
usefulness of attitude reports in predicting behaviours that are driven by feelings. If, instead
of having people analyze their romantic relationships, Wilson had first asked them to get
more in touch with their feelings (“How do you feel when you are with and apart from your
partner?”), the attitude reports might have been more insightful. Other decisions people
make—say, choosing which school to attend based on considerations of cost, career advancement, and so forth—seem more cognitively driven. For these, an analysis of reasons rather
than feelings may be most useful. Although the heart has its reasons, sometimes the mind’s
own reasons are decisive.
This research on the limits of our self-knowledge has two practical implications. The first
is for psychological inquiry. Self-reports are often untrustworthy. Errors in self-understanding
limit the scientific usefulness of subjective personal reports.
The second implication is for our everyday lives. The sincerity with which people report
and interpret their experiences is no guarantee of the validity of those reports. Personal testimonies are powerfully persuasive (as we will see in Module C, “Social Psychology in Court”).
But they may also be wrong. Keeping this potential for error in mind can help us feel less intimidated by others and be less gullible.
SUMMING UP: SELF-CONCEPT: WHO AM I?
•
•
•
•
Our sense of self helps organize our thoughts and actions. Self-concept consists of two
elements: the self-schemas that guide our processing of self-relevant information, and
the possible selves that we dream of or dread.
Cultures shape the self, too. Many people in individualistic Western cultures assume an
independent self. Others, often in collectivistic cultures, assume a more interdependent
self. These contrasting ideas contribute to cultural differences in social behaviour.
Our self-knowledge is curiously flawed. We often do not know why we behave the way we
do. When influences upon our behaviour are not conspicuous enough for any observer to
see, we, too, can miss them. The unconscious, implicit processes that control our behaviour may differ from our conscious, explicit explanations of it.
We also tend to mispredict our emotions. We underestimate the power of our psychological immune systems and thus tend to overestimate the durability of our emotional reactions to significant events.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
SELF-ESTEEM: HOW AM I?
People desire self-esteem, which they are motivated to enhance. But inflated self-esteem
also has a dark side.
self-esteem
a person’s overall selfevaluation or sense of
self-worth
Is self-esteem—our overall self-evaluation—the sum of all our self-schemas and possible
selves? If we see ourselves as attractive, athletic, smart, and destined to be rich and loved, will
we have high self-esteem? Yes, said Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe (2001)—when we feel
good about the domains (looks, smarts, or whatever) important to our self-esteem. “One person may have self-esteem that is highly contingent on doing well in school and being physically
attractive, whereas another may have self-esteem that is contingent on being loved by God and
adhering to moral standards.” Thus, the first person will feel high self-esteem when made to feel
smart and good-looking, the second person when made to feel moral.
But Jonathon Brown and Keith Dutton (1994) argued that this “bottom-up” view of selfesteem is not the whole story. The causal arrow, they believed, also goes the other way. People
who value themselves in a general way—those with high self-esteem—are more likely to value
their looks, abilities, and so forth. They are like new parents who, loving their infant, delight in
the baby’s fingers, toes, and hair: The parents do not first evaluate their infant’s fingers or toes
and then decide how much to value the whole baby.
Specific self-perceptions do have some influence, however. If you think you’re good at
math, you will be more likely to do well at math. Although general self-esteem does not predict
academic performance very well, academic self-concept—whether you think you are good in
school—does predict performance (Marsh & O’Mara, 2008). Of course, each causes the other:
Doing well at math makes you think you are good at math, which then motivates you to do
even better. So if you want to encourage someone (or yourself!), it’s better if your praise is
specific (“you’re good at math”) instead of general (“you’re great”); and it’s better if your kind
words reflect true ability and performance (“you really improved on your last test”) rather than
unrealistic optimism (“you can do anything”). Feedback is best when it is true and specific
(Swann et al., 2007).
Imagine you’re getting your grade back for the first test in a psychology class. When you
see your grade, you groan—you’re hovering somewhere between a D and an F. But then you get
an encouraging email with some review questions for the class and this message: “Students who
have high self-esteem not only get better grades, but they remain self-confident and assured. . . .
Bottom line: Hold your head—and your self-esteem—high.” Another group of students instead
get a message about taking personal control of their performance, or receive review questions
only. So how would each group do on the final exam? To the surprise of the researchers in one
study, the students whose self-esteem was boosted did by far the worst on the final; in fact, they
flunked it (Forsyth et al., 2007). Poor students told to feel good about themselves, the researchers suggested, may have thought, “I’m already great—why study?”
SELF-ESTEEM MOTIVATION
Abraham Tesser (1988) reported that a “self-esteem maintenance” motive predicts a variety of
interesting findings, even friction among brothers and sisters. Do you have a sibling of the same
gender who is close to you in age? If so, people probably compared the two of you as you grew
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up. Tesser presumed that people’s perceiving one of you as more capable than the other would
motivate the less able one to act in ways that maintained his or her self-esteem. (Tesser thought
the threat to self-esteem was greatest for an older child with a highly capable younger sibling.)
Men with a brother with markedly different ability typically recall not getting along well with
him; men with a similarly able brother are more likely to recall very little friction.
Self-esteem threats occur among friends, whose success can be more threatening than that
of strangers (Zuckerman & Jost, 2001). In contrast, researchers at the University of Toronto
have found that people often react more positively to upward than downward comparisons to
romantic partners (Pinkus, Lockwood, Schimmack, & Fournier, 2008). When a partner outperforms us in a domain important to both our identities, we may reduce the threat by affirming our relationship, saying, “My capable partner, with whom I’m very close, is part of who I
am” (Lockwood et al., 2004).
What underlies the motive to maintain or enhance self-esteem? Mark Leary (1998, 2004b,
2007) believed that our self-esteem feelings are like a fuel gauge. Relationships enable surviving and thriving. Thus, the self-esteem gauge alerts us to threatened social rejection, motivating us to act with greater sensitivity to others’ expectations. Studies confirmed that social
rejection lowers our self-esteem and makes us more eager for approval. Spurned or jilted,
we feel unattractive or inadequate. Like a blinking dashboard light, this pain can motivate
action—self-improvement and a search for acceptance and inclusion elsewhere.
Jeff Greenberg (2008) offered another perspective. If self-esteem were only about acceptance,
he countered, why do “people strive to be great rather than to just be accepted”? The reality of our
own death, he argued, motivates us to gain recognition from our work and values. There’s a worm
in the apple, however: Not everyone can achieve such recognition, which is exactly why it is valuable, and why self-esteem can never be wholly unconditional (“You’re special just for being you” is
an example of self-esteem being granted unconditionally). To feel our lives are not in vain, Greenberg maintained, we must continually pursue self-esteem by meeting the standards of our societies.
Among sibling relationships,
the threat to self-esteem
is greatest for an older
child with a highly capable
younger brother or sister.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
THE “DARK SIDE” OF SELF-ESTEEM
Low self-esteem predicts increased risk of depression, drug abuse, and some forms of
delinquency (Salmela-Aro & Nurmi, 2007; Trzesniewski et al., 2006). For a person with low
self-esteem, even public success can be aversive, by provoking anxiety that he or she will never
live up to others’ heightened expectations (Wood et al., 2005). (Have you ever done so well in
a game, a recital, or a school exam that you worried about disappointing others on the next
occasion?) High self-esteem fosters initiative, resilience, and pleasant feelings (Baumeister et
al., 2003). Yet high self-esteem can have a dark side as well. Teen males who engage in sexual
activity at an “inappropriately young age” tend to have higher than average self-esteem. So do
teen gang leaders, extreme ethnocentrists, and terrorists, noted Robyn Dawes (1994, 1998).
Finding their favourable self-esteem threatened, people often react by putting others
down, sometimes with violence. A youth who develops a big ego, which then gets threatened or
deflated by social rejection, is potentially dangerous. In one experiment, Todd Heatherton and
Kathleen Vohs (2000) threatened some undergraduate men, but not those in a control condition, with a failure experience on an aptitude test. In response to the failure, only men with high
self-esteem became considerably more antagonistic (Figure 2–6).
In another experiment, Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister (1998) had undergraduate
volunteers write a short essay, in response to which another supposed student gave them either
praise (“great essay!”) or stinging criticism (“one of the worst essays I have read!”). Then each
essay writer played a reaction time game against the other student. When the opponent lost,
the writer could assault him or her with noise of any intensity and for any duration. After criticism, the people with the biggest egos—those who agreed with “narcissistic” statements such as
“I am more capable than other people”—were “exceptionally aggressive.” They delivered three
times the auditory torture of those with non-narcissistic self-esteem. Wounded pride motivates
FIGURE 2–6
WHEN BIG EGOS
GET CHALLENGED.
Ratings of antagonistic behaviour
18
Control
When feeling
threatened, only highself-esteem men
became significantly
more antagonistic—
arrogant, rude, and
unfriendly. (Data from
Heatherton & Vohs,
2000)
Threat
16
14
12
10
0
Low self-esteem
High self-esteem
Condition
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retaliation. The same was true in a classroom setting: Those who were high in narcissism were
most likely to retaliate against a classmate’s criticism by giving him or her a bad grade (Bushman
et al., 2009). In each case, the combination of narcissism and high self-esteem was particularly
potent; individuals with this combination were the most aggressive. “The enthusiastic claims
of the self-esteem movement mostly range from fantasy to hogwash,” said Baumeister
(1996), who suspected he had “probably published more studies on self-esteem than anybody
else.” “The effects of self-esteem are small, limited, and not all good.” High-self-esteem folks,
he reported, are more likely to be obnoxious, to interrupt, and to talk at people rather than
with them (in contrast to the more shy, modest, self-effacing folks with low self-esteem). “My
conclusion is that self-control is worth 10 times as much as self-esteem.”
Do the big egos of people who sometimes do bad things conceal inner insecurity and low
self-esteem? Do assertive, narcissistic people actually have weak egos that are hidden by a selfinflating veneer? Many researchers have tried to find low self-esteem beneath such an outer crust.
But studies of bullies, gang members, genocidal dictators, and obnoxious narcissists have turned
up no sign of it. “Hitler had very high self-esteem,” noted Baumeister and his co-authors (2003).
The findings linking highly positive self-views with negative behaviour—what Baumeister
and his colleagues called “the dark side of high self-esteem”—exist in tension with findings that
people expressing low self-esteem are more vulnerable to assorted clinical problems, including anxiety, loneliness, and eating disorders. When feeling bad or threatened, low-self-esteem
people tend to take a negative view of everything. They notice and remember others’ worst
behaviours and think their partners don’t love them (Murray et al., 1998, 2002; Ybarra, 1999).
Christian Jordan from Wilfrid Laurier University and his colleagues (2003, 2005) suggested that this tension may be more apparent than real. They suggested that not all high-selfesteem people are alike. New research indicates that self-esteem, like attitudes, comes in two
forms—explicit (consciously controlled) and implicit (automatic or intuitive). Jordan and his
colleagues argued that when people have conscious views of themselves that are positive, but
have low implicit self-esteem, they are likely to have fragile self-views. In several studies, they
found that people with such fragile high self-esteem are more defensive: They rationalize their
decisions more, and discriminate more against Aboriginal Canadians than other people do. Ian
MacGregor and his colleagues (McGregor & Marigold, 2003; McGregor et al., 2005) similarly
found that York University students with fragile self-esteem responded defensively to uncertainty by compensating with increased convictions in their political and social opinions and by
perceiving greater popularity for their views.
Unlike a fragile self-esteem, a secure self-esteem—one rooted more in feeling good about
who one is than on grades, looks, money, or others’ approval—is conducive to long-term wellbeing (Kernis, 2003; Schimel et al., 2001). Jennifer Crocker and her colleagues (2002, 2003,
2004, 2005) confirmed this in studies with University of Michigan students. Those whose selfworth was most fragile—most contingent on external sources—experienced more stress, anger,
relationship problems, drug and alcohol use, and eating disorders than did those whose worth
was rooted more on internal sources, such as personal virtues. Ironically, noted Crocker and
Lora Park (2004), those who pursue self-esteem, perhaps by seeking to become beautiful, rich,
or popular, may lose sight of what really makes for quality of life. Moreover, if feeling good
about ourselves is our goal, then we may become less open to criticism, more likely to blame
than empathize with others, and more pressured to succeed at activities rather than enjoy them.
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Over time, such pursuit of self-esteem can fail to satisfy our deep needs for competence, relationship, and autonomy, noted Crocker and Park. To focus less on one’s self-image, and more
on developing one’s talents and relationships, eventually leads to greater well-being.
SUMMING UP: SELF-ESTEEM
•
•
•
Self-esteem is the overall sense of self-worth we use to appraise our traits and abilities.
Our self-concepts are determined by multiple influences, including the roles we play, the
comparisons we make, our social identities, how we perceive others appraising us, and
our experiences of success and failure.
Self-esteem motivation influences our cognitive processes: Facing failure, high-selfesteem people sustain their self-worth by perceiving other people as failing, too, and by
exaggerating their superiority over others.
Although high self-esteem is generally more beneficial than low, researchers have found
that people high in both self-esteem and narcissism are the most aggressive. Someone
with a big ego who is threatened or deflated by social rejection is potentially aggressive.
THE SELF IN ACTION
Several lines of research point to the significance of our perceived self-control and how we
manage the self in action. What concepts emerge from this research?
So far we have considered what our self-concept is, how it develops, and how well we know
ourselves. Now let’s see why our self-concept matters, by viewing the self in action.
SELF-CONTROL
The self ’s capacity for action has limits, noted Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (1998, 2000;
Muraven et al., 1998). Consider the following findings:
•
•
•
People who exert self-control—by forcing themselves to eat radishes rather than
chocolates, or by suppressing forbidden thoughts—subsequently quit faster when
given unsolvable puzzles.
People who have tried to control their emotional responses to an upsetting movie
exhibit decreased physical stamina.
People who have spent their willpower on tasks such as controlling their emotions
during an upsetting film later become less restrained in their sexual thoughts and
behaviours. In one study, students who depleted their willpower by focusing their
attention on a difficult task were later, when asked to express a comfortable level of
intimacy with their partner, were more likely to make out and even remove some
clothing (Gailliot & Baumeister, 2007).
Effortful self-control depletes our limited willpower reserves. Our brain’s “central executive” consumes available blood sugar when engaged in self-control (Gailliot, 2008). This
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57
may reduce activity in brain areas responsible for detecting conflict between our actions and
our goals—an important function for maintaining self-control (Inzlicht & Gutsell, 2007).
Self-control, therefore, operates similarly to muscular strength, concluded Baumeister and
Julia Exline (2000): Both are weaker after exertion, replenished with rest, and strengthened
by exercise.
Although the self ’s energy can be depleted, our self-concepts do influence our behaviour
(Graziano et al., 1997). Given challenging tasks, people who imagine themselves as hardworking and successful outperform those who imagine themselves as failures (Ruvolo & Markus,
1992). Envision your positive possibilities and you become more likely to plan and enact a successful strategy.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS VERSUS SELF-DETERMINATION
The benefits of feelings of control also appear in animal research. Dogs taught that they cannot
escape shocks while confined will learn a sense of helplessness. Later these dogs cower passively in other situations when they could escape punishment. Dogs that learn personal control
(by successfully escaping their first shocks) adapt easily to a new situation. Researcher Martin
Seligman (1975, 1991) noted similarities to this learned helplessness in human situations.
Depressed or oppressed people, for example, become passive because they believe their efforts
have no effect. Helpless dogs and depressed people both suffer paralysis of the will, passive
resignation, even motionless apathy (Figure 2–7).
On the other hand, people benefit by training their self-control “muscles.” That’s the conclusion of studies by Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng (2006) at Sydney’s Macquarie University.
For example, students who were engaged in practising self-control by daily exercise, regular
study, and time management became more capable of self-control in other settings, both in the
laboratory and when taking exams. If you develop your self-discipline in one area of your life, it
may spill over into other areas as well.
Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin (1976) tested the importance of personal control by treating elderly patients in a highly-rated nursing home in one of two ways. With one group, the
benevolent caregivers stressed “our responsibility to make this a home you can be proud of and
happy in.” They gave the passive patients their normal well-intentioned, sympathetic care, and
they allowed them to assume a passive care-receiving role. Three weeks later, most were rated
by themselves, by interviewers, and by nurses as further debilitated. Langer and Rodin’s other
treatment promoted personal control. It stressed opportunities for choice, the possibilities for
influencing nursing-home policy, and the person’s responsibility “to make of your life whatever
you want.” These patients were given small decisions to make and responsibilities to fulfill.
Over the ensuing three weeks, 93 percent of this group showed improved alertness, activity,
and happiness.
Uncontrollable
bad events
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 57
Perceived
lack of
control
Learned
helplessness
learned helplessness
the hopelessness and
resignation learned
when a human or animal
perceives no control over
repeated bad events
FIGURE 2–7
LEARNED
HELPLESSNESS.
When animals and
people experience
uncontrollable bad
events, they learn
to feel helpless and
resigned.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
Studies have confirmed that systems of governing or managing people that promote
self-efficacy—a belief in your own competence—will, indeed, promote health and happiness
(Deci & Ryan, 1987). Here are some additional examples:
•
•
•
•
•
•
University students who develop a sense of control over school gain a greater sense of
control over their lives (Guay, Mageau, Vallerand, 2003).
Prisoners given some control over their environments—by being able to move chairs,
control TV sets, and switch the lights—experience less stress, exhibit fewer health
problems, and commit less vandalism (Ruback et al., 1986; Wener et al., 1987).
Workers given leeway in carrying out tasks and making decisions experience
improved morale (Miller & Monge, 1986). So do telecommuting workers who have
more flexibility in balancing their work and personal life (Valcour, 2007).
Institutionalized residents allowed choice in such matters as what to eat for breakfast,
when to go to a movie, whether to sleep late or get up early, may live longer and certainly are happier (Timko & Moos, 1989).
Homeless shelter residents who perceive little choice in when to eat and sleep, and
little control over their privacy, are more likely to have a passive, helpless attitude
regarding finding housing and work (Burn, 1992).
In all countries studied, including Canada, people who perceive themselves as
having free choice experience greater satisfaction with their lives. And countries
where people experience more freedom have more satisfied citizens (Inglehart &
Welzel, 2005).
Although this psychological research on perceived self-control is relatively new, the
emphasis on taking charge of one’s life and realizing one’s potential is not. The notion that “you
can do it if you try hard enough” has permeated our culture. When we were little children, most
of us were taught the story about the Little Engine That Could. The cultural lesson is clear: If
you try hard enough and keep a positive attitude, you can achieve whatever you dream. We find
the same lesson in many self-help books and videos.
Confidence and feelings
of self-efficacy grow from
successes.
© The New Yorker Collection, 1983,
Edward Koren, from cartoonbank.com.
All rights reserved.
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Research on self-control gives us greater confidence in traditional virtues
such as perseverance and hope. A sense of self-control does not grow primarily
by self-persuasion (“I think I can, I think I can”) or by puffing people up like
hot-air balloons (“You’re terrific!). Its chief source is the experience of success.
If your initial efforts to lose weight, stop smoking, or improve your grades succeed, your self-efficacy increases.
59
“Argue for your limitations,
and sure enough they’re
yours.”
RICHARD BACH, ILLUSIONS:
ADVENTURES OF A RELUCTANT
MESSIAH, 1977
SUMMING UP: THE SELF IN ACTION
•
•
•
•
Our sense of self helps organize our thoughts and actions.
Our ability to effortfully regulate our behaviour, or willpower, works similarly to muscular strength. It can be exhausted by use in the short term, but can also be strengthened by
regular exercise.
Learned helplessness often occurs when attempts to improve a situation have proven
fruitless; self-determination, in contrast, is bolstered by experiences of successfully exercising control and improving one’s situation.
People who believe in their own competence and effectiveness cope better and achieve
more than those who have learned a helpless, pessimistic outlook.
SELF-SERVING BIAS: SEEING
THE SELF POSITIVELY
As we process self-relevant information, a potent bias intrudes. We readily excuse our
failures, accept credit for our successes, and in many ways see ourselves as better than
average. Such self-enhancing perceptions enable most people to enjoy the benefits of high
self-esteem, while occasionally suffering the perils of pride.
Most of us have a good reputation with ourselves. In studies of self-esteem, even low-scoring
people respond in the mid-range of possible scores. (A low-self-esteem person responds to such
statements as “I have good ideas” with a qualifying modifier, such as “somewhat” or “sometimes.”)
In a study of self-esteem across 53 nations, including Canada, the average self-esteem score was
above the midpoint in every single country (Schmitt & Allik, 2005). One of social psychology’s
most provocative yet firmly established conclusions concerns the potency of self-serving bias.
self-serving bias
the tendency to perceive
yourself favourably
EVALUATING THE SELF
When evaluating the self, do we act as dispassionate observers or do we try to see ourselves in
a positive light? We do tend to view ourselves positively; but is this self-serving bias a simple
inference from our beliefs about ourselves, or is it a motivated bias? There is actually evidence
that both types of processes occur. If a dispassionate observer had the same information about
us that we have, they would often make the same inferences we make. Self-serving biases can be
solely the result of our cognitive machinery.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
Nevertheless, a motivational engine powers our cognitive machinery (Dunning, 1999; Kunda, 1990). We are not just cool, informationprocessing machines. We are motivated to see ourselves positively and
are adept at doing so.
Explanations for positive and negative events
The self-serving bias.
© Jean Sorensen.
self-serving
attributions
a form of self-serving
bias; the tendency
to attribute positive
outcomes to yourself and
negative outcomes to
other factors
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Time and again, experimenters have found that people readily accept
credit when told they have succeeded. They attribute the success to
their ability and effort, but they attribute failure to such external factors as bad luck or the problem’s inherent “impossibility” (Whitley &
Frieze, 1985; Campbell & Sedikides, 1999). Similarly, in explaining
their victories, athletes commonly credit themselves; but they attribute losses to something else: bad breaks, bad referee calls, or the
other team’s super effort or dirty play (Grove et al., 1991; Lalonde,
1992; Mullen & Riordan, 1988). And how much responsibility do you
suppose car drivers tend to accept for their accidents? On insurance
forms, drivers have described their accidents in words such as these:
“An invisible car came out of nowhere, struck my car and vanished,”
“As I reached an intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision,
and I did not see the other car,” and “A pedestrian hit me and went
under my car” (Toronto News, 1977).
Situations that combine skill and chance (games, exams, job applications) are especially
prone to the phenomenon: Winners can easily attribute their successes to their skill, while losers
can attribute their losses to chance. When you win at Scrabble, it’s because of your verbal
dexterity; when you lose, it’s “Who could get anywhere with a Q but no U?” Politicians similarly
tend to attribute their wins to themselves (hard work, constituent service, reputation, and strategy)
and their losses to factors beyond their control (their district’s party makeup, their opponent’s
name, and political trends) (Kingdon, 1967). This phenomenon of self-serving attributions
(attributing positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to something else) is one of the
most potent of human biases.
Self-serving attributions contribute to marital discord, worker dissatisfaction, and bargaining impasses (Kruger & Gilovich, 1999). Small wonder that divorced people usually blame
their partner for the breakup (Gray & Silver, 1990), or that managers usually blame poor performance on workers’ lack of ability or effort (Imai, 1994; Rice, 1985). (Workers, on the other
hand, are more likely to blame something external—inadequate supplies, excessive workload,
difficult co-workers, or ambiguous assignments.) Small wonder, too, that people evaluate
reward distributions such as pay raises as fairer when they receive a bigger raise than most of
their co-workers (Diekmann et al., 1997).
Ironically, we are even biased against seeing our own bias. People claim they avoid selfserving bias themselves, but readily acknowledge that others commit this bias (Pronin et al.,
2002). This “bias blind spot” can have serious consequences during conflicts. If you’re negotiating with your roommate over who does household chores and you believe your roommate has
a biased view of the situation, you’re much more likely to become angry (Pronin & Ross, 2006).
Apparently we see ourselves as objective and everyone else as biased. No wonder we fight: We’re
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each convinced we’re “right” and free from bias. As the T-shirt slogan says, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.”
Is the self-serving bias universal, or are people in collectivistic cultures immune? People
in collectivistic cultures associate themselves with positive words and valued traits (Gaertner
et al., 2008; Yamaguchi et al., 2007). However, in some studies, collectivists are less likely to selfenhance by believing they are better than others (Heine & Hamamura, 2007), particularly in
individualistic domains (Sedikides et al., 2003).
Can we all be better than average?
Self-serving bias also appears when people compare themselves with others. If Chinese
philosopher Lao-tzu was right that “at no time in the world will a man who is sane overreach
himself, overspend himself, overrate himself,” then most of us are a little insane. For on subjective,
socially desirable, and common dimensions, most people see themselves as better than the average
person. Compared with people in general, most people see themselves as more ethical, more
competent at their job, friendlier, more intelligent, better looking, less prejudiced, healthier, and
even more insightful and less biased in their self-assessments (see “Focus on: Self-Serving Bias—
How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways,” on page 63).
Every community, it seems, is like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, where “all
the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Many people believe that they will become even more above average in the future—“If I’m good
now, I will be even better soon” (Kanten & Teigen, 2008). One of Freud’s favourite jokes was the
husband who told his wife, “If one of us should die, I think I would go live in Paris.”
Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly (1979) observed a marital version of self-serving bias. They
found that young married Canadians usually felt they took more responsibility for such activities as cleaning the house and caring for the children than their spouses credited them for. In
a more recent study of married couples with children, husbands estimated that they did 42
percent of the housework. Wives estimated that their husbands did 33 percent. When researchers tracked actual housework (by sampling participants’ activity at random times using beepers), they found husbands actually carrying 39 percent of the domestic workload (Lee & Waite,
2005). The general rule: Group members’ estimates of how much they contribute to a joint task
typically sum to more than 100 percent (Savitsky et al., 2005). But what if you had to estimate
how often you performed rare household chores, like cleaning the oven? Here, you’re likely to
be more accurate in your estimate (Kruger & Savitsky, 2009). Apparently this occurs because
we have more knowledge about our behaviour than about someone else’s, and we assume that
other people’s behaviour will be less extreme than ours (Kruger et al., 2008; Moore & Small,
2007). If you can remember cleaning the oven only a few times, you might assume you are
unusual and that your partner must do this more often. The same holds for a trivia contest:
Students say they have only a small chance of winning if the questions are about the history of
Mesopotamia, apparently not recognizing that their fellow students are probably equally clueless about this subject area (Windschitl et al., 2003). When people receive more information
about others’ actions, however, the discrepancy disappears.
Within commonly considered domains, subjective behaviour dimensions (such as
“disciplined”) trigger greater self-serving bias than objective behaviour dimensions (such as
“punctual”). Subjective qualities give us leeway in constructing our own definitions of success
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STORY behind the RESEARCH
Suppose that you have collaborated on a project with
another student and that the two of you evaluated
each other’s contributions to the final product. You
may be disappointed to discover that your partner
is less impressed with the quality and extent of your
contribution than you are. In the history of science,
there are many examples of such disagreements; erstwhile friends and colleagues become bitter enemies
as they contest each other’s contributions to important discoveries.
[Fiore] Sicoly and I suggested that individuals
generally tend to accept more responsibility for a joint
product than other contributors attribute to them. In
many everyday activities, participants are unaware of
their divergent views because they don’t share their
opinions with each other. After cleaning the kitchen,
for example, spouses don’t usually discuss how much
each contributed to the cleanup.
When such opinions are
voiced, people are likely to
be upset because they believe
that the other person is not
giving them sufficient credit.
If the consequences are
Michael Ross
high (e.g., academic grades, University of Waterloo
job promotions, or Nobel
prizes at stake), they may well assume that their partner is deliberately downgrading their contributions to
enhance his or her own achievements.
In our research, Sicoly and I showed that differences in assessments of responsibility are common
in many everyday contests, and that contrasting judgments may reflect normal cognitive processes rather
than deliberate deceit. Differences in judgment can
result from honest evaluations of information that is
differentially available to the two participants.
(Dunning et al., 1989, 1991). Rating my “athletic ability,” I ponder my basketball play, not the
agonizing weeks I spent as a Little League baseball player hiding in right field. Assessing my “leadership ability,” I conjure up an image of a great leader whose style is similar to mine. By defining
ambiguous criteria in our own terms, each of us can see ourselves as relatively successful. In one
University Entrance Examination Board survey of 829 000 high school seniors, none rated themselves below average in “ability to get along with others” (a subjective, desirable trait), 60 percent
rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent saw themselves among the top 1 percent!
Researchers have wondered: Do people really believe their above-average
“Views of the future are so
self-estimates? Is their self-serving bias partly a function of how the questions are
rosy that they would make
phrased (Krizan & Suls, 2008)? When Elanor Williams and Thomas Gilovich (2008)
Pollyanna blush.”
had people bet real money when estimating their relative performance on tests,
SHELLEY E. TAYLOR,
they found that, yes, “people truly believe their self-enhancing self-assessments.”
POSITIVE ILLUSIONS, 1989
Unrealistic optimism
Optimism predisposes a positive approach to life. “The optimist,” noted H. Jackson Brown
(1990, p. 79), “goes to the window every morning and says, ‘Good morning, God.’ The pessimist
goes to the window and says, ‘Good god, morning.’ ” Studies of more than 90 000 people across
22 cultures reveal that most humans are more disposed to optimism than pessimism (Fischer &
Chalmers, 2008). Indeed, many of us have what researcher Neil Weinstein (1980, 1982) termed
“an unrealistic optimism about future life events.” Partly because of their relative pessimism
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FOCUS ON
SELF-SERVING BIAS—HOW DO I LOVE ME? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
“The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background,” noted Dave Barry (1998), “is that
deep down inside, we all believe that we are above
average drivers.” We also believe we are above average on most any other subjective and desirable
trait. Among the many faces of self-serving bias are
these:
•
•
•
Ethics. Most businesspeople see themselves as
more ethical than the average businessperson
(Baumhart, 1968; Brenner & Molander, 1977). One
national survey asked, “How would you rate your
own morals and values on a scale from 1 to 100 (100
being perfect)?” Fifty percent of people rated themselves 90 or above; only 11 percent said 74 or less
(Lovett, 1997).
Professional competence. Ninety percent of business managers rated their performance as superior
to their average peer (French, 1968). In Australia,
86 percent of people rated their job performance as
above average, 1 percent as below average (Headey
& Wearing, 1987). Most surgeons believed their
patients’ mortality rate to be lower than average
(Gawande, 2002).
Virtues. In the Netherlands, most high school students rated themselves as more honest, persistent,
original, friendly, and reliable than the average
high school student (Hoorens, 1993, 1995).
•
•
•
•
•
Intelligence. Most people perceive themselves as
more intelligent, better looking, and much less
prejudiced than their average peer (Public Opinion,
1984; Wylie, 1979). When someone outperforms
them, people tend to think of the other as a genius
(Lassiter & Munhall, 2001).
Parental support. Most adults believe they support
their aging parents more than do their siblings
(Lerner et al., 1991).
Health. Los Angeles residents view themselves
as healthier than most of their neighbours, and
most university students believe they will outlive
their actuarially predicted age of death by about
10 years (Larwood, 1978; C. R. Snyder, 1978).
Insight. Others’ words and deeds reveal their
natures, we presume. Our private thoughts do the
same. Thus, most of us believe we know and understand others better than they know and understand
us. We also believe we know ourselves better than
others know themselves (Pronin et al., 2001). Few
university students see themselves as more naïve
or more gullible than others; many more think
they’re less naïve and gullible (Levine, 2003).
Driving. Most drivers—even most drivers who have
been hospitalized for accidents—believe themselves to be safer and more skilled than the average driver (Guerin, 1994; McKenna & Myers, 1997;
Svenson, 1981). Dave Barry got it right!
about others’ fates (Hoorens et al., 2008; Shepperd, 2003), students perceive
themselves as far more likely than their classmates to get a good job, draw a
good salary, and own a home. They also see themselves as far less likely to experience negative events, such as developing a drinking problem, having a heart attack
before age 40, or being fired.
Parents extend their unrealistic optimism to their children, assuming their
child is less likely to drop out of college, become depressed, or get lung cancer than
the average child, but more likely to complete college, remain healthy, and stay
happy (Lench et al., 2006).
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“God, give us grace to
accept with serenity
the things that cannot
be changed, courage to
change the things which
should be changed, and the
wisdom to distinguish the
one from the other.”
REINHOLD NIEBUHR,
“THE SERENITY PRAYER,” 1943
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64
PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
NON SEQUITUR © 1999 Wiley Miller.
Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate.
Reprinted with permission. All rights
reserved.
Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability. Believing ourselves immune to misfortune,
we do not take sensible precautions. Sexually active undergraduate women who don’t consistently use contraceptives perceive themselves, compared to other women at their university, as
much less vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy (Burger & Burns, 1988). Elderly drivers who rated
themselves as “above average” were four times more likely than more modest drivers to flunk
a driving test and be rated “unsafe” (Freund et. al., 2005). Students who enter university with
inflated assessments of their academic ability often suffer deflating self-esteem and well-being
and are more likely to drop out (Robins & Beer, 2001).
Those who cheerfully shun seat belts, deny the effects of smoking, and stumble into ill-fated
relationships remind us that blind optimism, like pride, may go before a fall. When gambling,
optimists persist longer than pessimists, even when piling up losses (Gibson & Sanbonmatsu,
2004). If those who deal in the stock market or in real estate perceive their business intuition to
be superior to that of their competitors, they, too, may be in for severe disappointment. Even
the seventeenth-century economist Adam Smith, a defender of human economic rationality,
foresaw that people would overestimate their chances of gain. This “absurd presumption in
their own good fortune,” he said, arises from “the overweening conceit which the greater part of
men have of their own abilities” (Spiegel, 1971, p. 243).
Unrealistic optimism appears to be on the rise. In the 1970s, half of American high school
seniors predicted that they would be “very good” workers as adults—the highest rating available in the study, and thus the equivalent of giving themselves five stars out of five. By 2006,
two-thirds of teens believed they would achieve this stellar outcome—placing themselves in the
top 20 percent (Twenge & Campbell, 2008)! Even more striking, half of high school seniors in
2000 believed that they would earn a graduate degree—even though only 9 percent were likely
to actually do so (Reynolds et al., 2006).
Optimism definitely beats pessimism in promoting self-efficacy, health, and well-being
(Armor & Taylor, 1996). If our optimistic ancestors were more likely than their pessimistic
neighbours to surmount challenges and survive, then small wonder that we are disposed
to optimism (Haselton & Nettle, 2006). Yet a dash of realism can save us from the perils of
unrealistic optimism. Students who exhibit excess optimism (as many students destined for low
grades do) can benefit from having some self-doubt, which motivates study (Prohaska, 1994;
Sparrell & Shrauger, 1984). Students who are overconfident tend to underprepare, whereas
their equally able but less confident peers study harder and get higher grades (Goodhart, 1986;
Norem & Cantor, 1986; Showers & Ruben, 1987). The moral: Success in school and beyond
requires enough optimism to sustain hope and enough pessimism to motivate concern.
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False consensus and uniqueness
We have a curious tendency to further enhance our self-images by overestimating or underestimating the extent to which others think and act as we do. On matters of opinion, we find
support for our positions by overestimating the extent to which others agree—a phenomenon
called the false consensus effect (Krueger & Clement, 1994; Marks & Miller, 1987; Mullen & false consensus effect
Goethals, 1990). Those who favoured the Charlottetown Accord (a Canadian referendum in the tendency to
1992) and those who supported New Zealand’s National Party wishfully overestimated the overestimate the
commonality of
extent to which others agreed (Babad et al., 1992; Koestner, 1993). The sense we make of the
one’s opinions and
world seems like common sense.
one’s undesirable or
When we behave badly or fail in a task, we reassure ourselves by thinking that such lapses unsuccessful behaviours
also are common. After one person lies to another, the liar begins to perceive the other person
as dishonest (Sagarin et al., 1998). They guess that others think and act as they do:
“I think few people have
“I lie, but doesn’t everyone?” If we smoke or cheat on our income taxes, we are
conventional family
likely to overestimate the number of other people who do likewise. If we feel sexual
relationships.”
desire toward someone, we may overestimate that person’s reciprocal desire. Four
MADONNA, 2000
recent studies illustrate further:
•
•
•
•
People who sneak a shower during a shower ban believe (more than non-bathers) lots
of others are doing the same (Monin & Norton, 2003).
Those thirsty after hard exercise imagine that lost hikers would become more bothered
by thirst than by hunger. That’s what 88 percent of thirsty post-exercisers guessed in
a study by Leaf Van Boven and George Lowenstein (2003), compared with 57 percent
of people who were about to exercise.
As people’s own lives change, they see the world changing. Protective new parents
come to see the world as a more dangerous place. People who go on a diet judge food
ads to be more prevalent (Eibach et al., 2003).
People who harbour negative ideas about another racial group presume that many
others also have negative stereotypes (Krueger, 1996). Thus our perceptions of others’
stereotypes may reveal something of our own.
“We don’t see things as they are,” says the Talmud. “We see things as we are.”
False consensus may occur because we generalize from a limited sample, which prominently includes ourselves (Dawes, 1990). Lacking other information, why not “project” ourselves; why not impute our own knowledge to others and use our responses as a clue to their
likely responses? Also, we’re more likely to associate with people who share our attitudes and
behaviours and then to judge the world from the people we know.
On matters of ability or when we behave well or successfully, a false uniqueness
effect more often occurs (Goethals et al., 1991). We serve our self-image by seeing our talents
and moral behaviours as relatively unusual. Thus those who drink heavily but use seat belts will
overestimate (false consensus) the number of other heavy drinkers and underestimate (false
uniqueness) the commonality of seat belt use (Suls et al., 1988). Thus we may see our failings as
relatively normal and our virtues as relatively exceptional.
Temporal comparison
Our comparisons with others can be sources of self-serving bias, and so can our comparisons
with the person we used to be and the person we want to become. These temporal comparisons
with our past and future selves also put the current self in a positive light.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 65
false uniqueness
effect
the tendency to
underestimate the
commonality of one’s
abilities and one’s
desirable or successful
behaviours
temporal comparison
a comparison between
how the self is viewed
now and how the self was
viewed in the past or how
the self is expected to be
viewed in the future
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
Illusory optimism: Most
couples marry feeling
confident of long-term love.
Actually, in individualistic
cultures, new marriages
often fail.
Anne Wilson from Wilfrid Laurier University and Mike Ross from the
University of Waterloo (Wilson & Ross, 2001; Ross & Wilson, 2002) have studied temporal comparisons extensively. They have found that people maintain a
positive view of themselves by disparaging their distant past selves and complimenting their recent past selves. In one experiment, for example, Wilson and
Ross had university students and their parents rate the students on a number of
traits both as they currently were and as they were when they were 16. As can
be seen in Figure 2–8, both students and their parents believed that they had
ACTRESS PAMELA ANDERSON
(QUOTED BY TALBERT, 1997)
improved significantly with time. This evidence suggests that people may disparage their past selves; but it could simply indicate a developmental trend—maybe
people just get better with time. However, Wilson and Ross (2001) also had students rate
themselves at the beginning of term and then retrospectively rate their beginning-of-term
self again at the end of term. The students remembered themselves as being much worse
at the beginning of term than they actually rated themselves at the time—their
“The past is to be respected
sense of improvement was thus more illusion than reality.
and acknowledged, but not
Ross and Wilson (2002) also found that we perceive positive past selves as
to be worshipped. It is our
closer in time and negative past selves as more distant. In one study, they had
future in which we will find
students rate their social success in high school and later rate how psychologiour greatness.”
cally distant high school seemed. For those who were popular in high school, it
PIERRE ELLIOT TRUDEAU, CANADIAN
felt more recent than for those who were less popular, and the effect was espeMUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION LIBRARY
cially strong for people high in self-esteem. As we will see later in this chapter,
high-self-esteem people are often more self-enhancing than low-self-esteem people. It seems
that bringing positive past selves closer and pushing away negative past selves is one way to
self-enhance. This tendency even extends to our social groups: German but not Canadian
students felt that the Holocaust occurred in the more distant past when they read about
German atrocities committed at that time (Peetz et al., 2010). Our glory days may often feel
like yesterday, while our defeats and transgressions feel like ancient history.
“Everybody says I’m plastic
from head to toe. Can’t
stand next to a radiator
or I’ll melt. I had (breast)
implants, but so has every
single person in L.A.”
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
67
FIGURE 2–8
Ratings of self at age 16 and now
Both university
students and their
parents believe they
have improved with
time. (Wilson & Ross,
2001)
8
Students
Parents
7
6
5
Age 16
Now
To sum up, these tendencies toward self-serving attributions, self-congratulatory comparisons, illusory optimism, and false consensus for our failings are major sources of self-serving
bias (Figure 2–9).
EXPLAINING SELF-SERVING BIAS
Why do people perceive themselves in self-enhancing ways? One explanation sees the selfserving bias as a by-product of how we process and remember information about ourselves.
Comparing ourselves with others requires us to notice, assess, and recall their behaviour
and ours. Thus, there are multiple opportunities for flaws in our information processing
(Chambers & Windschitl, 2004). Recall the study in which married people gave themselves
Self-serving bias
Example
Attributing your success to
ability and effort, failure to
luck and things external
I got the A in history because I studied hard.
I got the D in sociology because the exams
were unfair.
Comparing yourself favourably
to others
I’m better to my parents than my sister is.
Unrealistic optimism
Even though 50% of marriages fail, I know
mine will be one of enduring joy.
False consensus and uniqueness
I know most people agree with me that
global warming threatens our future.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 67
FIGURE 2–9
HOW SELFSERVING BIAS
WORKS.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
credit for doing more housework than their spouses did. Might this not be due, as Michael
Ross and Fiore Sicoly (1979) believed, to our greater recall for what we’ve actively done and
our lesser recall for what we’ve not done or merely observed our partner doing? We can
easily picture ourselves picking up the laundry, but we are less aware of the times we absentmindedly overlook it.
Are the biased perceptions, then, simply a perceptual error, an emotion-free glitch in
how we process information? Or are self-serving motives also involved? It’s now clear from
research that we have multiple motives. Questing for self-knowledge, we’re motivated to assess
our competence (Dunning, 1995). Questing for self-confirmation, we’re motivated to verify our
self-conceptions (Sanitioso et al., 1990; Swann, 1996, 1997). Questing for self-affirmation, we’re
especially motivated to enhance our self-image (Sedikides, 1993). Self-esteem motivation helps
power self-serving bias. As social psychologist Daniel Batson (2006) surmised, “The head is an
extension of the heart.”
REFLECTIONS ON SELF-ESTEEM AND SELF-SERVING BIAS
If you are like some readers, by now you are finding the self-serving bias either depressing or
contrary to your own occasional feelings of inadequacy. Even the people who exhibit the selfserving bias may feel inferior to specific individuals, especially those who are a step or two
higher on the ladder of success, attractiveness, or skill. Moreover, not everyone operates with
a self-serving bias. Some people do suffer from low self-esteem. Positive self-esteem does have
some benefits.
The self-serving bias as adaptive
Self-esteem has its dark side, but also its bright side. When good things happen, high- more
than low-self-esteem people tend to savour and sustain the good feelings (Wood et al., 2003).
(William W. Haefeli, Saturday Review,
1/20/79). Reprinted with permission of
General Media Magazines.
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
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“Believing one has more talents and positive qualities than one’s peers allows one to feel good
about oneself and to enter the stressful circumstances of daily life with the resources conferred
by a positive sense of self,” noted Shelley Taylor and her co-researchers (2003).
Self-serving bias and its accompanying excuses also help protect people from depression
(Snyder & Higgins, 1988). Non-depressed people excuse their failures on laboratory tasks or
perceive themselves as being more in control than they are. Depressed people’s self-appraisals
are more accurate: sadder but wiser. (You will learn more about this in Module B.)
Self-serving bias additionally helps buffer stress. George Bonanno and colleagues (2005)
assessed the emotional resiliency of workers who escaped the World Trade Center or its environs
on September 11, 2001. They found that those who displayed self-enhancing tendencies were
the most resilient.
In their “terror management theory,” Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski (1997) proposed another reason why positive self-esteem is adaptive: It buffers anxiety,
including anxiety related to our certain death. In childhood, the theory posits, we learn that
when we meet the standards taught to us by our parents, we are loved and protected; when we
don’t, love and protection may be withdrawn. We, therefore, come to associate viewing ourselves
as good with feeling secure. Greenberg and colleagues argued that positive self-esteem—viewing
ourselves as good and secure—even protects us from feeling terror over our eventual death.
Their research shows that reminding people of their mortality (say, by writing a short essay on
dying) motivates them to affirm their self-worth. Moreover, when facing threats, increased
self-esteem leads to decreased anxiety.
As research on depression and anxiety suggests, there may be some practical wisdom in self-serving perceptions. It may be strategic to believe we are smarter, stronger, and
more socially successful than we are. Cheaters may give a more convincing display of honesty if they believe themselves honourable. Belief in our superiority can also motivate us to
achieve—creating a self-fulfilling prophecy—and can sustain a sense of hope in difficult times
(Willard & Gramzow, 2009).
© The New Yorker Collection, 1983, Dana
Fradon, from cartoonbank.com. All rights
reserved.
The self-serving bias as maladaptive
Although self-serving pride may help protect us from
depression, it can at times be maladaptive. People who
blame others for their social difficulties are often unhappier than people who can acknowledge their mistakes
(C. A. Anderson et al., 1983; Newman & Langer, 1981;
Peterson et al., 1981).
Research by Barry Schlenker (1976; Schlenker &
Miller, 1977a, 1977b) has also shown how self-serving
perceptions can poison a group. As a rock band guitarist during his college days, Schlenker noted that “rock
band members typically overestimated their contributions to a group’s success and underestimated their
contributions to failure. I saw many good bands disintegrate from the problems caused by these self-glorifying
tendencies.” In his later life as a University of Florida
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
70
social psychologist, Schlenker explored group members’ self-serving perceptions. In nine experiments, he had people work together on some task. He then
falsely informed them that their group had done either well or poorly. In every
one of these studies, the members of successful groups claimed more responsiCOUNT GALEAZZO CIANO, THE
CIANO DIARIES, 1938
bility for their group’s performance than did members of groups that supposedly failed at the task.
If most group members believe they are underpaid and underappreciated relative to
their better-than-average contributions, disharmony and envy are likely. College presidents and academic deans will readily recognize the phenomenon. Ninety percent or
more of university faculty members rate themselves as superior to their average colleague
(Blackburn et al., 1980; Cross, 1977). It is, therefore, inevitable that when merit salary
raises are announced and half receive an average raise or less, many will feel themselves
victims of injustice.
group-serving bias
Self-serving biases also inflate people’s judgments of their groups, a phenomenon
explaining away
out-group members’
called group-serving bias. When groups are comparable, most people consider their own
positive behaviours;
group superior (Codol, 1976; Jourden & Heath, 1996; Taylor & Doria, 1981). Here are some
also attributing negative
findings:
“Victory finds a hundred
fathers but defeat is an
orphan.”
behaviours to their
dispositions (while
excusing such behaviour
by one’s own group).
After just one brief
conversation with a
prospective employee,
interviewers are prone
to overconfidence in their
intuitive judgments.
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 70
•
•
•
Most university sorority members perceive those in their sorority as far less likely to
be conceited and snobby than those in other sororities (Biernat et al., 1996).
Most (53 percent) of Dutch adults rate their marriage or partnership as better than that of
most others; only 1 percent rate it as worse than most (Buunk & van der Eijnden, 1997).
Most corporation presidents and production managers overpredict their own firms’
productivity and growth (Kidd & Morgan, 1969; Larwood & Whittaker, 1977).
That people see themselves and their groups with a
favourable bias is hardly new. The tragic flaw portrayed in
ancient Greek drama was hubris, or pride. Like the subjects of our experiments, the Greek tragic figures were
not self-consciously evil; they merely thought too highly
of themselves. In literature, the pitfalls of pride are portrayed again and again. In theology, pride has long been
first among the “seven deadly sins.”
If pride is akin to the self-serving bias, then what is
humility? Is it self-contempt? Humility is not handsome
people trying to believe they are ugly and clever people
trying to believe they are slow-witted. False modesty can
actually be a cover for pride in one’s better-than-average
humility. (James Friedrich [1996] reports that most students congratulate themselves on being better than average at not thinking themselves better than average!) True
humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.
It leaves people free to rejoice in their special talents and,
with the same honesty, to recognize the talents of others.
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SUMMING UP: SELF-SERVING BIAS
•
•
•
•
Contrary to the presumption that most people suffer from feelings of inferiority, researchers consistently find that most people exhibit a self-serving bias. In experiments and
everyday life, we often take credit for successes while blaming failures on the situation.
Most people rate themselves as better than average on subjective, desirable traits and
abilities. We exhibit unrealistic optimism about our futures. And we overestimate the
commonality of our opinions and foibles (false consensus) while underestimating the
commonality of our abilities and virtues (false uniqueness).
We also remember ourselves in the past and project ourselves into the future in ways that
portray a positive image of the current self. Such perceptions arise partly from a motive
to maintain and enhance self-esteem, a motive that protects people from depression but
contributes to misjudgment and group conflict.
Self-serving bias can be adaptive in that it allows us to savour the good things that happen
in our lives. When bad things happen, however, self-serving bias can have the maladaptive effect of causing us to blame others or feel cheated out of something we “deserved.”
SELF-PRESENTATION: LOOKING
GOOD TO OTHERS
Humans seem motivated not only to perceive themselves in self-enhancing ways but also
to present themselves favourably to others. How might people’s tactics of “impression
management” lead to false modesty or to self-defeating behaviour?
So far we have seen that the self is at the centre of our social worlds, that self-esteem and
self-efficacy pay dividends, and that self-serving bias influences self-evaluations. But are selfenhancing expressions always sincere? Do people have the same feelings privately as they
express publicly? Or are they just putting on a positive face even while living with self-doubt?
SELF-HANDICAPPING
Sometimes people sabotage their chances for success by creating impediments that make success less likely. Far from being deliberately self-destructive, such behaviours typically have a
self-protective aim (Arkin et al., 1986; Baumeister & Scher, 1988; Rhodewalt, 1987): “I’m really
not a failure—I would have done well except for this problem.”
Why would people handicap themselves with self-defeating behaviour? Recall that we
eagerly protect our self-images by attributing failures to external factors. Can you see why,
fearing failure, people might handicap themselves by partying half the night before
“With no attempt there can
a job interview or playing video games instead of studying before a big exam?
be no failure; with no failure
When self-image is tied up with performance, it can be more self-deflating to try
no humiliation.”
hard and fail than to procrastinate and have a ready excuse. If we fail while working
WILLIAM JAMES, PRINCIPLES OF
under a handicap, we can cling to a sense of competence; if we succeed under such
PSYCHOLOGY, 1890
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72
self-handicapping
protecting one’s selfimage with behaviours
that create a handy
excuse for later failure
PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
conditions, it can only boost our self-image. Handicaps protect both self-esteem and public
image by allowing us to attribute failures to something temporary or external (“I was feeling
sick”; “I was out too late the night before”) rather than to lack of talent or ability.
Steve Berglas and Edward Jones (1978) confirmed this analysis of self-handicapping. One
experiment was announced as concerning “drugs and intellectual performance.” Imagine yourself in the position of their participants. You guess answers to some difficult aptitude questions
and then are told, “Yours was one of the best scores seen to date!” Feeling incredibly lucky,
you are then offered a choice between two drugs before answering more of these items. One
drug will aid intellectual performance and the other will inhibit it. Which drug do you want?
Most students wanted the drug that would supposedly disrupt their thinking and thus provide
a handy excuse for anticipated poorer performance.
Researchers have documented other ways in which people self-handicap. Fearing failure,
people will do the following:
•
•
•
•
Reduce their preparation for important individual athletic events (Rhodewalt et al.,
1984).
Give their opponent an advantage (Shepperd & Arkin, 1991).
Perform poorly at the beginning of a task in order not to create unreachable expectations (Baumgardner & Brownlee, 1987).
Not try as hard as they could during a tough, ego-involving task (Hormuth, 1986;
Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Riggs, 1992; Turner & Pratkanis, 1993).
IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
self-presentation
the act of expressing
yourself and behaving in
ways designed to create
a favourable impression
or an impression that
corresponds to your
ideals
mye19847_ch02_033-075.indd 72
Self-serving bias, false modesty, and self-handicapping reveal the depth of our concern for selfimage. To varying degrees, we are continually managing the impressions we create. Whether
we wish to impress, to intimidate, or to seem helpless, we are social animals, playing to an
audience.
Self-presentation refers to our wanting to present a desired image both to an external
audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves). We work at managing
the impressions we create. We excuse, justify, or apologize as necessary to shore up our
self-esteem and verify our self-image (Schlenker & Weigold, 1992). Just as we preserve our
self-esteem, we also must make sure not to brag too much and risk the disapproval of others
(Anderson et al., 2006). Social interaction is a careful balance of looking good while not
looking too good.
In familiar situations, self-presentation happens without conscious effort. In unfamiliar
situations, perhaps at a party with people we would like to impress or in conversation with
someone of the other sex, we are acutely self-conscious of the impressions we are creating;
we are, therefore, less modest than when among friends who know us well (Leary et al.,
1994; Tice et al., 1995). Preparing to present ourselves in a photograph, we may even try out
different faces in a mirror. We do so even though active self-presentation depletes energy,
which often leads to diminished effectiveness—for example, to less persistence on a tedious
experimental task or more difficulty stifling emotional expressions (Vohs et al., 2005). The
upside is that self-presentation can unexpectedly improve mood. People feel significantly
better than they thought they would after doing their best to “put their best face forward”
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
73
and concentrate on making a positive impression on their boyfriend or girlfriend. Elizabeth
Dunn of the University of British Columbia and her colleagues concluded that “date nights”
for long-term couples work because they encourage active self-presentation, which improves
mood (Dunn et al., 2008).
Social networking sites such as Facebook provide a new and sometimes intense venue for
self-presentation. They are, according to communications professor Joseph Walther, “like
impression management on steroids” (Rosenbloom, 2008). Users make careful decisions
about which pictures, activities, and interests to highlight in their profiles. Some even think
about how their friends will affect the impression they make on others; one study found that
those with more attractive friends were perceived as more attractive themselves (Walther et
al., 2008). Given the concern with status and attractiveness on social networking
“Public opinion is always
sites, it is not surprising that people high in narcissistic traits thrive on Facebook,
more tyrannical towards
tallying up more friends and choosing more attractive pictures of themselves to
those
who obviously fear it
display (Buffardi & Campbell, 2008).
than towards those who feel
Given our concern for self-presentation, it’s no wonder, say self-presentation
indifferent to it.”
researchers, that people will self-handicap when failure might make them look bad
BERTRAND RUSSELL, THE CONQUEST
(Arkin & Baumgardner, 1985). It’s no wonder that people take health risks—tanning
OF HAPPINESS, 1930
their skin with wrinkle- and cancer-causing radiation; becoming anorexic; failing
to obtain and use condoms; yielding to peer pressures to smoke, get drunk, and do drugs (Leary
et al., 1994). It’s no wonder that people express more modesty when their self-flattery is vulnerable to being debunked, perhaps by experts who will be scrutinizing their self-evaluations
(Arkin et al., 1980; Riess et al., 1981; Weary et al., 1982). Professor Smith will
“It is not, therefore,
express less confidence in the significance of her work, for example, when presentnecessary
for a prince
ing it to professional colleagues than when presenting to students.
to have all the desirable
For some people, conscious self-presentation is a way of life. They continuqualities . . .
but it is very
ally monitor their own behaviour and note how others react, then adjust their
necessary
to
seem
to have
social performance to gain a desired effect. Those who score high on a scale
them.”
of self-monitoring tendency (who, for example, agree that “I tend to be what
NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI, 1469–1527
people expect me to be”) act like social chameleons—they adjust their behaviour in
response to external situations (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000; Snyder, 1987). Having
attuned their behaviour to the situation, they are more likely to espouse attitudes they don’t self-monitoring
really hold (Zanna & Olson, 1982). Being conscious of others, they are less likely to act on being attuned to the way
their own attitudes. As Mark Leary (2004) observed, the self they know often differs from the you present yourself
in social situations
self they show. As social chameleons, those who score high in self-monitoring are also less
and adjusting your
committed to their relationships and more likely to be dissatisfied in their marriages (Leone & performance to create
Hawkins, 2006).
the desired impression
Those who score low in self-monitoring care less about what others think. They are
more internally guided and thus more likely to talk and act as they feel and believe (McCann
& Hancock, 1983). For example, if asked to list their thoughts about gay couples, they simply express what they think, regardless of the attitudes of their anticipated audience (Klein
et al., 2004). As you might imagine, someone who is extremely low in self-monitoring
could come across as an insensitive boor, whereas extremely high self-monitoring could
result in dishonest behaviour worthy of a con artist. Most of us fall somewhere between
those two extremes.
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PART 1SOCIAL THINKING
74
In Asian countries, selfpresentation is restrained.
Children learn to identify
themselves with their
groups.
Presenting oneself in ways that create a desired impression is a delicate balancing act. People want to be seen as able, but also as modest and honest (Carlston
& Shovar, 1983). In most situations, modesty creates a good impression, unsolicited boasting a bad one (Forsyth et al., 1981; Holtgraves & Srull, 1989; Schlenker
& Leary, 1982). Hence the false modesty phenomenon: We often display lower
self-esteem than we privately feel (Miller & Schlenker, 1985). But when we
have obviously done extremely well, the insincerity of a disclaimer (“I did well,
but it’s no big deal”) may be evident. To make good impressions—as modest yet
competent—requires social skill.
JAPANESE BAR ASSOCIATION
OFFICIAL KOJI YANASE, EXPLAINING
Self-presented modesty is greatest in cultures that value self-restraint, such
WHY THERE ARE HALF AS MANY
as those of China and Japan (Heine & Lehman, 1995, 1997; Lee & Seligman,
LAWYERS IN HIS COUNTRY AS IN THE
1997; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Wu & Tseng, 1985). In China and Japan, people
GREATER WASHINGTON AREA ALONE,
NEWSWEEK, FEBRUARY 26, 1996
exhibit less self-serving bias. Unlike Westerners, who (as we have seen in this
chapter) tend to take credit for successes and attribute failures to the situation,
Japanese children learn to share credit for success and to accept responsibility for
failures. “When I fail, it’s my fault, not my group’s” is a typical Japanese attitude (Anderson,
1999).
Despite such self-presentational concerns, people worldwide are privately self-enhancing.
Self-serving bias has been noted among Dutch high school and university students, Belgian
basketball players, Indian Hindus, Japanese drivers, Israeli and Singaporean schoolchildren,
Australian students and workers, Chinese students, Hong Kong sportswriters, and French
people of all ages (Codol, 1976; de Vries & van Knippenberg, 1987; Falbo et al., 1997; Feather,
1983; Hagiwara, 1983; Hallahan et al., 1997; Jain, 1990; Lefebvre, 1979; Liebrand et al., 1986;
Murphy-Berman & Sharma, 1986; and Ruzzene & Noller, 1986, respectively).
“If an American is hit
on the head by a ball at
the ballpark, he sues. If
a Japanese person is hit
on the head he says, ‘It’s
my honor. It’s my fault.
I shouldn’t have been
standing there.’”
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CHAPTER 2THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
75
SUMMING UP: SELF-PRESENTATION
•
•
•
•
As social animals, we adjust our words and actions to suit our audiences. To varying
degrees, we self-monitor; we note our performance and adjust it to create the impressions
we desire.
Such impression management tactics explain examples of false modesty, in which people
put themselves down, extol future competitors, or publicly credit others when privately
they credit themselves.
Sometimes people will even self-handicap with self-defeating behaviours that protect
self-esteem by providing excuses for failure.
Self-presentation refers to our wanting to present a favourable image both to an external
audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves). With regard to an external audience, those who score high on a scale of self-monitoring adjust their behaviour to
each situation, whereas those low in self-monitoring may do so little social adjusting that
they seem insensitive.
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